


Compromised

by stardustedship



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Femslash February, Hurt/Comfort, Some Plot, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 00:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13823013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustedship/pseuds/stardustedship
Summary: Sombra knows the only way to get Moira to go with her to Dorado is to offer up something she wants. It turns out they have a lot in common, and a few of their goals are even more closely aligned than they thought-- or they're about to be.





	Compromised

“You know,” Sombra said, leaning casually against the nearby wall as though she had not just materialized there, “when Gabe said you hack people too, I didn’t think he was being quite so….literal.”

It had taken a week for Moira to completely mask her surprise when Sombra showed up in places she shouldn’t be, but it had paid off immensely in the form of the disappointed expression that flicked across Sombra’s face with every successive failure to make Moira jump. She continued measuring the liquid in the tubes before her, speaking to the wall. “It is easier, I’ve found, to skip the entrapments of politeness and flattery and manipulate biology itself.”

Sombra took in the organized chaos of the lab; the cacophony of glass and color and scattered equations hastily scribbled and crossed out. “Sure,” she deadpanned. “Much easier.”

“Was there a reason you stopped by?” Moira asked.

“Do you ever take that backpack thing off?” Sombra knew very well what Moira called her apparatus. She also knew that Moira knew this and it made her bristle. Sombra lived for bristling.

“The point, please.”

Sombra eased off the wall and slipped next to Moira to rest an elbow on the lab table’s surface. “Ever been to Dorado?”

Moira’s bichromatic eyes shifted to Sombra for half a beat, and then returned to her experiment. “I assume you have.”

Sombra waved a hand. “I’ve been all over. But there’s something in Dorado the Gabe wants me to check on, and well…” she shrugged.

“You’re perfectly capable of a mission without me,” Moira said. “So I still don’t understand why you’re here.”

“How would you like a fresh batch of subjects for one of your tests? Lowlife nobodies. Untraceable and unloved by the government.” Sombra studied her nails innocently, feeling Moira resist giving away any hint of curiosity. Or maybe she was imagining it. Moira was aggravating that way. She didn’t behave like others.

“I have access to anyone I would need right here,” Moira said. She glanced meaningfully at Sombra. “By the way, how’s the coffee been tasting?”

Sombra scoffed. “I don’t drink Talon’s coffee. I’m not an amateur.”

Moira laughed once, a gentle, derisive thing. She had a great deal of respect for Sombra’s relentless quest for knowledge, but the girl was as susceptible as her targets to the right kind of pressure. “I said nothing about manipulating the coffee itself.” Sombra’s face froze as she worked to shift it into nonchalance.

“It’s always nice to have unsupervised patients, however,” Moira mused. “Fewer…ramifications in the case of an unforeseen side effect getting away from me.”

Sombra had recovered, because that was what Sombra did. If Moira had blinked, she’d have missed any effect whatsoever.

Moira did not blink.

“So you’ll come, then.” Sombra peered intently at a tube containing a violently red liquid.

“When were you thinking of leaving?” Moira asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” Sombra said. “Five o’ clock sharp.”

“Very well.” Moira replaced her two tubes into their holders and pulled her shoulders back in a stretch. It was a surprisingly human gesture, coming from someone who regularly undid the effects of sleeplessness in order to continue functioning at full capacity around the clock.

Not for the first time, Sombra wondered what the scientist would look like asleep. She couldn’t help it, really. Cataloging vulnerabilities was her job, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d taken sleep as a weakness for granted until she met someone who could literally modify the need for it and turn it into energy. There was nothing to indicate that Sombra could compromise her sexually, either, and all of Moira’s darkest secrets were a constant source of discussion and controversy online. Finding her cracks would take time. A lot of time.

“Why are you staring at me?”

The voice snapped Sombra back to the present and she grinned languidly. “Just planning ahead,” she said. She made a show of yawning, sauntering towards the door. “It’s getting late,” she said over her shoulder. “You will see me in the morning.” She waved and vanished.

Moira began to pull her gloves off and unbutton her lab coat. “And she calls Gabriel dramatic,” she muttered.

 

 

The trip had been fairly slow thus far, all things considered. Moira ran a slender finger around the rim of her whiskey glass and glanced at her keypad disinterestedly. The bar was small, dimly lit by what appeared to be large individual Christmas lights, and virtually uninhabited. Tinny Spanish music floated from a radio behind the counter as the bartender wiped the same twenty glasses over and over, staring off into the distance.

Maybe she should’ve brought the more volatile mixture after all. Those handful of thugs she’d injected here earlier had shown no indication of being impeded. Which was the point, she figured. What she’d given them had been the antidote to the poison she’d slipped into their drinks three hours ago. Her nails tapped against the faded wood of the table. She wondered if Sombra was having any more fun than herself.

The door crashed open with an unruly shout just as Moira was deciding it was time to call the small experiment a success and head to the meetup point. The man who staggered in was limping and sweating, but the grin on his white-painted face was delirious and grim. “La capturamos, Ernesto.” He collapsed onto a stool at the bar and noticed Moira through the gloom. He swapped to heavily accented English. “I see you’re still here. How about a drink on me?”

“I was just leaving,” Moira said, draining her whiskey and standing up.

The man shrugged. “Your loss,” he said. “But I am here to celebrate!” He turned back to the bartender. “La Sombra infame,” he said, waving a hand across his face in mock awe. “Aquí en Dorado. ¿Te lo puedes creer?”

Moira drifted over to the bar, withdrawing a couple of bills and handing them to Alejandro. “Your tip,” she said, and turned to the man. “Sombra?” she asked, deliberately keeping her voice even. What trouble had her arrogance landed her in this time? The man had enough self preservation to be intimidated by Moira’s regal posture and how very much taller than he was sitting down. Or standing up.

Still, he was cheerful when he replied. “So you’ve heard of her!” he said. “Wanted by just about every organization in the world, but Volskaya came by a few months ago, said there was a chance she’d show up back here. She lived here once, see. One of our own. Little Olivia Colomar, all grown up and worth millions.”

Moira did not keep the derision from her voice. “And you caught her?”

He gestured to the hole in his rough pants, the disrupted flesh beneath. An energy wound. Boring. “She got me, but the others are after her and they’ve jammed her fancy wires with that lovely bit of Volskaya technology. They’ll have her within the hour, and we’ll be rich. Fancy that drink now?” He winked.

Moira’s mind jumped to several plans immediately, a development that she regarded from a distance with some interest. Was her aesthetic attraction so powerful? Moira passed the bartender several more bills as the man took a giant swig of beer from his glass, her expression never changing.

“Qué es esto?” Ernesto asked, and Moira didn’t have to have a basic grasp of Spanish to understand the question. Her lips quirked upwards as she looked back at the man.

“For body removal,” she said, and nodded casually to the drink. She was out the door before the words registered with either of them.

No, she decided as a garbled scream began in the tavern seconds later. She didn’t kill for aesthetics. There was something in Sombra, then, that demanded her attention. Well, Moira thought, she had it.

 

 

Sombra was in trouble, possibly more trouble than she’d been in since she’d been caught by the mysterious organization all those years ago. The tech around her and inside her had gone dark and unresponsive, and she was backed into a dead end with six Los Muertos men grinning ghoulishly in their glowing stripes and designs. They’d been expecting her, warned ahead of time. But how? Moira? The thought was gone as soon as it arrived. She did not trust Moira, but she trusted her utter indifference to Sombra’s motives. So how?

“Tell me how you are blocking my technology,” she demanded. Several of the men laughed, but she waited. They were stupid. One of them would gloat.

And indeed, it was the one she was pretty sure was Miguel, though he had been a teen like her the last time she had seen him. “Volskaya said you’d be here,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” Sombra spat. “Why would they assume I’d be back here, talking to you?” She wasn’t surprised to have been set up. She was surprised to know that someone had enough information to do it. Still, Volskaya was not the type to give more detail than was needed. She still had some cards to play. The lightbulb above her sputtered weakly, bright enough to hamper her dark vision but dim enough that she could not clearly see the shapes before her.

“Because,” said the man glowing green, “she knows who you are.” Sombra’s blood slowed. Impossible.

“You’re bluffing,” she said. “But I am not when I tell you—let me go, and I can get you enough money to provide for all of your families. Even protect the city, no surveillance attached.” On the bridge above the men, Sombra saw something dart past into the night.

The man chuckled. “She said you’d offer something like that,” he said. He began a poor imitation of a Russian accent: “She will offer you what you most want in life, and she will know what that is better than anyone. Whatever she offers you, I will double if you bring her to me.” Now he stepped forward into the light, and Sombra could make out his features.

“Raul,” she said.

He grinned at her. “Hello, Olivia.”

She was too stunned to completely dodge the butt of the gun that swept towards her. The blow caught her on the side of her forehead and knocked her sprawling across the tile and stone. The men behind him laughed and cheered as she staggered to her feet and assessed the suddenly blurry walls for a way up. The gun came up again, as light as a stick in Raul’s meaty hand. Sombra braced to dodge, knowing already that her chances of evading them all were slim to none. But she had to try.

As Raul braced to swing, triumph in his eyes, one of the men grunted in pain and collapsed to the ground, hard. Raul twisted his hand so that the barrel of the gun was pointed at Sombra and looked over his shoulder. “What is happening?”

“I don’t know,” said Miguel. “He just—“ his word cut off into a pained gasp, and then his colors sagged bonelessly against the wall of the arch and to the ground.

Raul turned back to her. “The notorious Sombra still works alone,” he growled. “We were promised this.”

She managed a shrug. “Not by me, you weren’t.” The lightbulb above Sombra’s head shattered, and she threw herself down into a roll as Raul whirled to face the invisible threat. Without that first blow, she might’ve easily made it past the remaining three disoriented gang members. A sudden wave of nausea overcame her as she got back on her feet, and she was unable to dodge the blind jab of a frantic blue-painted member. This time when she hit the ground, she did not get back up. One by one, the men fell with a grunt as Sombra struggled to clear her vision and stay awake, feeding from her feebly sparking anger at being rendered so completely defenseless.

Sharp footsteps tapped against the cobblestones beside her, and then Moira’s pale and impassive face was looming over her, high above in the moonlight. She felt like she was falling into it.

“Why are you so freaking tall?” Sombra demanded, and passed out.

 

 

Moira considered the woman at her feet for a long moment, nonplussed. Of all the things to say…there was nobody around to see the amusement creeping across her face, anyway. Something abot this woman, indeed. She knelt down and touched her fingers to the rapidly swelling lump on Sombra’s forehead. Definitely concussed, but nothing Moira didn’t have the ability to fix. Still, they weren’t safe in the middle of the street like this, and it wouldn’t do to be caught without the element of surprise. That was definitely why she had to take Sombra somewhere private. Absolutely. Moira sighed and retracted the disks from her hands and forearms, then gathered Sombra’s unconscious body into her arms and melted back into the night.

 

 

Sombra snapped awake with a start, disoriented. Everything was wrong—the bed too thin, the blanket scratchy, the smell of alcohol too pungent—and she sat bolt upright. Her tech flickered to life, the familiar hum of it like a breath of fresh air.

“I would say you shouldn’t move so quickly,” Moira said from the chair in the corner, “but I’m a bit more confident in my abilities than that.” Something was wrong with Sombra’s vision, and it took her a second to figure out what. Moira was without her backpack and her costume. In fact, she was lounging in a white button-down and a vest, collar undone and one leg slung carelessly over the other.

The feeling of wrongness intensified. “Where am I?” Sombra demanded. “Where have you taken me?”

Moira took a slow drag of her cigarette and considered it as she blew out the smoke. “You know the best part about my healing?” she said to nobody in particular. “Side effects become so…unnecessary. So please,” she turned her mismatched eyes to Sombra. “Stop behaving as though you’re still concussed and think.”

Sombra swallowed hard. Something about Moira’s unbuttoned collar, the cigarette dangling carelessly in her fingers, the way the lamplight moved in the glass in her other hand…how brain damaged was she, actually? “We’re in Ernesto’s bar,” she said finally, tearing her eyes away.

“Yes.”

“You brought me here after the fight,” she said.

“It was hardly a fight.”

“How did you find me?” she demanded. “Were you tracking me?”

“Nothing so frivolous, I’m afraid.” She took another sip of whiskey. “Though if you’d let me, I have all kinds of things I’d like to try on you.”

“No.”

“Such a quick reply,” Moira noted. “Still, Gabriel made it very clear that there was to be no experimenting on Talon members or affiliates without consent.”

“So the coffee…”

Moira smiled then—actually smiled. Sombra felt some possibly vital part of her brain grind to a halt. “I did so enjoy that joke,” she said.

Sombra’s temper flared, and she pushed herself to her feet. “Stop playing with me!” she demanded. “How did you find me? Why did you help me? What do you want?” It wasn’t like Sombra to behave this way, and they both knew it, but it also wasn’t like Sombra to be bested in conflict, or to be rendered so inept by her own information. As long as she was on a roll, she might as well get a few things straight.

Moira tilted her head. “I knew you to be a cautious woman,” she said, “but I never particularly guessed jaded.” Her voice softened. “There is nothing that I want that I would not ask you for directly.” Sombra filed that statement away somewhere out of the way and glared, waiting. “The men in the gang made excellent test subjects as you predicted,” Moira explained. “And all of my experiments come with trackers built in. All I had to do once one of their little friends came barging in and talking too much was follow the dots. As for why I helped you,” she sipped again, and Sombra could literally _feel_ her gaze as it swept her up and down. “What do you make of me, Sombra?”

The question threw her off balance for about the fifth time in the evening. She began to suspect that the woman before her had been in a greater position of power than Sombra had estimated. But she had gotten her wish; Moira was clearly something close to drunk, freer with her inhibitions and words than Sombra had ever seen her. This was as close to weakness as she could find. So why did she want to answer truthfully?

“You are like me in many ways,” Sombra said.

“A compliment I graciously accept.”

“I did not think…” Sombra hesitated. “I don’t understand why you would help me, if not for leverage.”

“You think me without principles,” Moira said lightly, “or emotion. It’s alright; you are far from the first. I often find it a useful façade.” She leaned forward. “Do you know why I joined Talon, Sombra?” She meant _Olivia_ but she did not say it. Sombra heard it anyway.

“Protection,” she said. “A place to continue your experiments without fear of general opinion putting you out of a job.”

“Very astute,” Moira acknowledged. “But in simpler terms, they pay me to do the one thing I have wanted to do my entire life: learn.”

Sombra blinked. “That’s it?”

“Isn’t that all you want as well?” Moira was genuinely curious.

“Yes, but I want to use that information to take down something big, something that people don’t even know about. I learn for a purpose.” Her eyes followed Moira’s long fingers as she stubbed out her cigarette. Where had her nails gone?

“I learn for exactly the same,” Moira said. “And neither of us have time for the rules and ethics of how we obtain that information. Talon is just the easiest method by which we may continue how we like.”

Sombra scrubbed a hand along the shaved side of her head, and that was when she caught Moira watching her in the same way she’d just been.

Their eyes locked. Caught.

Emboldened and brash, Sombra stepped forward and plucked Moira’s glass from her hand. Though Moira raised a fine eyebrow, she did not comment as Sombra drained it in one go.

“That was a lot of ‘we.’” She said, staring Moira down.

Moira shrugged. “Blame the alcohol,” she said. “Maybe deep down I have always wanted a 'we.'”

Sombra leaned forward until she was too close, until she had to brace her knee between Moira’s on the seat of the chair. “You are not a liar,” she said. “Don’t start now.”

Moira’s fingers brushed the smooth, blank spot where Sombra’s swelling had been. Sombra reached up and caught her hand in hers. “Oh?” Moira’s attention was well and truly captured now. Looking at those multicolored eyes made Sombra feel like the world was just slightly off balance, but right now she didn’t care.

She leaned in and kissed along Moira’s jaw, smug satisfaction and more than a little relief settling in her as Moira melted fractionally beneath her. The rigidity that had defined her since their meeting slipped very easily away, leaving Moira pliant and loose beneath Sombra’s touch.

“Are all of your team missions like this?” Moira asked drily. Sombra didn’t imagine it—there was a definite hitch in Moira’s breathing.

“Like what?” Sombra asked innocently, and nipped at her ear. She was fully in Moira’s lap now, and she pulled back to appreciate the hunger beginning to show on that angular face.

“You should know,” Moira said, “that if any of this is for information gathering purposes, I commend your style but question your confidence.”

Sombra fingered the open collar of Moira’s shirt. “Information, yes,” she said. “But not the kind you’re thinking of.”

“And what is it you wish to know?”

Sombra’s grin was positively dangerous. “What sound you make when I do this,” she said, closing in.


End file.
